Dancer Archive
Thread: Reactions from the other correspondents?
Atimeswrote:
You have acombat toon so you should know that anything that gives decent xp at the high levels cannot be played AFK. Once I was fighting3 huurtons huntresses while buffed (just3) and I had to leave the keyboard for a few minutes so I went afk. When I came back I was dead, not incapped but dead. Anything that gives decent xp must be fought at the keyboard.
Actually, I see afk guys at the top of the geo cave running strafe shot macros. They seem to do fine. If they do eventually get killed, so what? They still got experience, and they didn't lose any by dying.
Tanks wrote:
The issue of running CoB, spamming specialsetc. with recursive macros all the time is going to get addressed with the HAM changes. Gaining xp at a static spawn AFK has a pretty fast point of diminishing returns, and no you can not master TKA AFK unless you are not going to play your account for months because the experience would be so little. Static spawns that give decent exp. require you to play ATK, though recursive combat macros do help there and I have no problem with people using them. BTW, the recursive macros in combat are used for more then just spamming specials.
Geo Cave, like I said above. Hard to believe, but I see people leveling afk all over all the time. Maybe it's just my server.
What about people spamming for hours around starports (with auto-AFK turned off and keep-alive macros so the AFK filter doesn't work)?
That is an annoyance, though not game breaking. Is it worth the cure? NO.
Man, I think it is. I just have seen no examples of any macro that will be affected by this, that has a legitimate use. I see the recursive macro making these people spamming a lot LESS, to the point where they have to put in long pauses, and it becomes a good thing, imho. Advertising I like, but some dude filling the screen with ten shouts in one secondis awful.
What about people tumbling and healing AFK to master medic and doctor?
First, both medic and doctor have crafting, so you can not do it AFK totally. You also have to be ATK enough to train. The recursive macros will have no effect on this. However, again, the HAM changes will do away with this method of leveling.
Lol, you have to be ATK to train, good one (and actually, you don't--you can macro that too! As long as somebody is ATK to train you). This made me just realize something, though, will there be no more healing of entertainers, too? I always liked the interdependence. There are many more ways to exploit with recursive macros, besides things involving ham bars. Guys refreshing vendors 23 hours to get cheap merchant experience, for example. Regardless, I'm certain there will be all newways to get medic experience AFK after the ham changes, we just don't know yet. Of course there won't be recursive macros by then.
The main problem I have with this is that there were many suggestions put forth by Panthu to encourage ATK entertainer play. This change might help with the obvious buffbots, but it will not matter in player cities or PAs unless you do away with the macro capability period.
If one can write a macro to go through one buff cycle, then you will have buffbots. Example: Inmost PAs the musician/dancer are communal accounts which were being use semi-ATK anyway. So, if I am on I can run that account in a separate session and switch to it every 15 mins or so tokeep it going, as I log off, I hand it off to the next guy that is going to be on for the next 2-3 hours. You probably could cover it from server up to server down.
You know, that's fine with me. But it WILLaffect thelone wolfwho sets up his bot in the cantina and then proceeds to own it for the next 23 hours. The guild entertainers will have to be played semi-atk, that's fine with me. And the cantinas will be a lot less noisy. People complain about having to go in there for five minutes, imagine having to spend a day in there. Like the guys in front of the starport, it makes the game experience unpleasant. Maybe this isn't a big deal to you, but to others it's a lot more important.
This change is not the saviour ofthe entertainer profession, though it will help making the cantinas a bit less crowded of AFK entertainers, though I have noticed since Pub. 9, number of people in Cantinas is a lot less now. Will it encourage more people to become entertainers, or people to socialize with entertainers more? I doubt it. Are the benefits of this change worth the negative impact on a multitute of professions? I doubtthat as well.
I saw population drop off a bit with less hologrinding, no loss, far as I'm concerned. What I have seen,with this announced change, is true entertainers reactivating accounts. Most willprobably never come back. But those who would be attracted to playing an entertainer will no longer be repelled. I know you doubt it, but I don't. Not from any intuition, but because I will no longer tell the novice entertainer in Mos Eisley, when they ask how they will make a living, "You won't."I trust in the laws of supply & demand.The market value of buffs will no longer be zero credits, and who knows, maybe people will start tipping for healing again, if there are fewer entertainers, to encourage these people to keep it. Understand,for more than half a year,a playstyle was laid to waste with the hologrind, and the botting, and the damned recursive macros. Socializers had no place. This is an attempt to makethe gamevital for themagain. You doubt it? I don't.
I still am unconvinced how peoplehaving to tap a key every ten minutes will have such a negative impact on a multitude of professions. In fact, I still have seen no good examples of how anyone has a legitimate use for a recursive macro where it couldn't be easily rewritten. The closest was people with modules, macros calling other macros. Rewrite the damn things. It's hardily game breaking for someone to rewrite a macro, while recursive macros were game breaking for three professions, and the game as a whole.
All I hear is how so very hard it is to level in Star Wars Galaxies, which has one of the shortest "treadmills" of most any MMORPG on the market. People howl about sampling. This isn't Dark Age of Camelot or EQ here. My advice is to play the profession rather than "grinding" it. It won't take a year to reach the endgame. So you can't do it in three days? Give me a break!
- Go from Novice Artisan to Survey IV without leaving the keyboard.
I already did. It was fun. I was healing my survey group getting med xp and survey xp at the same time. Plus we had a nice little chat. Non-recursive macros still provide enough time to take a bio break or do the dishes while your toon is sampling.
- Never ever get up from the keys when waiting for a starship.
I don't use recursive macros for that now, why should I have a problem with this later ? Write a smart macro, not a brute force recursive one.
- Go from Business IV to Master Merchant in3 weeks or less, without ever using any type of AFK or having one used on your behalf.
Cannot comment on this, but I have heard rumors of master merchants who became master merchants even before the holo and macro craze. Somehow, it must be possible. Not in 3 days, but then I didn't get to slaughter anything but noob skeletons or goblins in UO or DAOC in three days, either.
That's just a sampling. Talk to me in a month when you're done, and THEN tell me removing AFK doesn't hurt.
I already did this when macros were an unknown quantity and againrecently when I started on an european server. I'm still alive and well.
Some parts of the game is broken. Macros are a way to work around that "brokenness" until the devs finally get around to fixing it... IF THEY EVER DO.
The solution is not whacking macros. Harmful AFK cannot beeliminated by code changes. It can be lessened by removing the desire for people to AFK - either by removing the rewards for doing so or by removing the tedium and boredom that encourage people to do so.It can only beeliminated by enacting and then enforcing policies. Doing so requires competent, trained, and active CSR staff.
Unfortunately, SOE does not have a competent, trained, active CSR staff.
I agree with you. I think we already came to this conclusion 10 months ago 
Right now we have guns for free and officially allowed murder. What we need is BOTH, no more free guns, more laws and people who enforce them. Only one is worked on, but it's better than nothing.
Unattended gameplay cannot be eliminated by codechanges, but supporting unattended gameplay by providing a very simple way to do so should stop.
Technically, the term recursive macro must be wrong. These macros don't recurse. They have no depth. They cannot find out if a parent in their call chain is the same as the current token, which would be a real recursion guard. If it were real recursive macros, the problem would be easier to solve.
The tumbling issue - If the ham revamp is implemented in its current conceptual state, it completely solves this problem.
The dancer issue - There needs to be some time of mini-game developed to where both entertainer and client are engaged in a fun and interesting way. Instead of just having us sit there and watch, we need to participate and interact/get feed back from the entertainers. /dance doesn't quite cut it. Make plain unattended, non-mini-game dancing work for healing, but have the mini-game healing far surpass it.
Also - Give cantinas regen on bf like there is for wounds and make bf healable in camps
I don't think its neccessary to remove the recursive macro'ing. Its just a lazy, bandaid solution to a much larger problem.
My in-game husband,an armorsmith, did this. In fact I think it took him two weeks total. He put up vendors in our guild hall that were empty. Just having them up gives you xp, apparently, even if nobody is AFK clicking on them. He also put a vendor outside Coronet and one in our hall outside Kor Vella and - gasp! - actually sold armor on them.
He got so many people buying armor, or just looking for armor, he easily mastered merchant in about two weeks. I think if you have an actual product people want to buy, it's easy to get vendor traffic. I suppose that's the way it was designed to work.
But speaking of merchants...whoa! How about that big ol' nerf bat they're swinging at merchants in publish 10? Honestly...are they on drugs or what??
Nijel_The_Destroyer wrote:
Hehehe... I was being ironic.
Given the original starting point of this thread.
Groovymarlin wrote:
But speaking of merchants...whoa! How about that big ol' nerf bat they're swinging at merchants in publish 10? Honestly...are they on drugs or what??
Sigrun wrote:
Groovymarlin wrote:
But speaking of merchants...whoa! How about that big ol' nerf bat they're swinging at merchants in publish 10? Honestly...are they on drugs or what??
Isn't that nice?
Now tailors will be able to sellus any color dance clothingwe want... as long aswe want black.
/sigh
Bah.. You'll just have to spend a little time searching for a live tailor to make it for you.
Nijel_The_Destroyer wrote:
Bah.. You'll just have to spend a little time searching for a live tailor to make it for you.
HalasterTheBlack wrote:
Nijel_The_Destroyer wrote:
Bah.. You'll just have to spend a little time searching for a live tailor to make it for you.
Or spend a LOT of time searching for a tailor who hasn't dropped crafting entirely because s/he can't list 1% of what s/he can make...